The company they invested in? The Eastman Egg Company — a purveyor of egg sandwiches.
Admittedly, a local restaurant chain may seem like an odd fit for a team of tech investors, but once you get past the name, you’ll quickly see that it’s about more than the eggs. What makes Eastman unique — and ripe for tech investment — is its unique approach to ordering.
Like many restaurants, Eastman has its own app, which customers can use to peruse the menu and put in orders ahead of time. But instead of asking customers to estimate when they’ll be there to pick up the order, Eastman’s app uses customers’ geolocation data to determine when to start cooking up orders.
“It’s pretty simple,” said Hunter Swartz, founder and CEO of Eastman (pictured left). “The idea is that you might want to be at our store at 9:05 before you head to your desk at 9:10 or 9:15, but you can’t control the ‘L,’ and you can’t control your CTA bus. We take that guesswork out of it.”
The way it’s timed, customers are usually handed their coffee as they walk in the door, with an additional minute or two’s wait for breakfast items, to ensure freshness.
Though the app has become central to the company’s business model, The Eastman Egg Company started off as a regular food truck. As the truck grew in popularity, so did the lines, with customer satisfaction dropping as a result. Swartz, who has a background in finance, started looking for solutions to the problem with long waits, and arrived at geolocation-based ordering as his solution.
To date, there are two Eastman Egg storefronts in downtown Chicago as well as a café located inside Trunk Club’s Chicago headquarters. Now the chain is looking to expand beyond Chicago.
"Eastman Egg is uniquely positioned to dominate the enormous fast-casual market, both because of its all-star team's focus on developing some of the most efficient and hyper-focused operations we have seen, and its understanding of the breakfast space,” said Hyde Park Angels Member and Fulcrum Investing CEO Kevin van Eekeren in a statement.
Van Eekeren will join Eastman’s board as part of the round. Other investors include the Sustainable Local Food Investment Group, Bluestein and Associates and Caretta Partners.
Images via The Eastman Egg Company.
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